Slashdot Mirror
How Is Obama Doing On Open Government?
An anonymous reader writes "OMB Watch today published an in-depth analysis of the Obama administration's progress on a wide-ranging set of open government recommendations. Key findings of the report include strong and consistent leadership from the White House on government openness and meaningful utilization of e-government and Web 2.0 technologies. But there has been no high-level effort to improve electronic records management and preservation, and the implementation of improved Freedom of Information Act policies has lagged."
I'm not sure. Let me ask him whether or not the NSA ran a warrantless-wiretapping operation at AT&T, and whether or not the CIA ferried people to other countries for torture. Someone dedicated to openness would undoubtedly answer that question clearly and unambiguously, right?
Reality: Recent history seems to show that there are two things no President has the power to affect: the Pentagon and Wall Street. Presidents can only begin new actions. They cannot end or meaningfully decrease existing ones where boots are on the ground.
We'll see what happens with Libya. If it turns into a Serbian-style air campaign, then we will be in and out relatively quickly. But if the Marines or Army get involved, we will be there indefinitely.
William Safire, before he was a New York Times columnist, worked as a speechwriter for Nixon. He wrote a book called Before the Fall about the pre-Watergate Nixon White House, and it's a pretty interesting set of stories about the man. One particularly informative anecdote is the story of Nixon trying to tear down a "temporary" building that had been erected on Pennsylvania Ave during WW2 as an office building (for the Navy, IIRC), on the grounds that it was unnecessary and architecturally inappropriate for the setting. It took the full might of the Presidency two years to get it torn down - much of which was spent fighting not Congress, but the Federal bureaucracy.